I wonder if leaders in the DHS, Army, and Navy are concerned about their billion-dollar POs to Microsoft resellers. I wonder if military strategists who understand what vulnerability to attack really is have provided any input into the purchasing decisions of these organizations.
It almost seems these purchasing decisions must have been purely "orders from the clouds," where the rank-n-file workers disagree but having dealing with it or quitting as their only options.
I think that ideally you'd want to buy your drives over a 6-8 months period from different suppliers for every drive...
I respectfully disagree. For a high-availability array, which would you rather have:
- a set of six matched drives, with the same firmware revision and protocol implementation nuances providing thousands fewer variables when troubleshooting a failing system.
- six randomly purchased drives with who-knows-what and who-knows-how-they-will-interact providing only the possibility of trial-and-error chance resolutions of problems.
I think there's a reason why Sun manages the firmware revision of their harddrives as part of their complete software configuration. Sun even provides patch sets to upgrade drives to fix anomolies that come up.
Yes, there is more than just brand-name behind Sun's high OEM prices (and Sun knows it too...that'll be $600, please).
Nope. Do you like the perverse array of special allowances, exclusions, preferences, credits, exemptions, and loopholes in the current tax code, nearly all of which are politically-motivated band-aids or favors for all sorts of people who don't really need or deserve them? If you do, I bet you can't wait for the splendor of federal-government-managed health care. It'll be great.
Also, you can look forward to the federal government having unfettered access to your personal medial history for whatever purpose they deem fit.
There are fundamental problems in arguments for nationalized health care that don't require the tin hat, however. One is scale. While Dean may have done wonders in his state of a few million people, just wait until he has to scale it up by two orders of magnitude while fighting the congresspeople of fifty mostly-independent states.
There are very good reasons why our government is distributed in nature (cities/counties/states/nation). Ironically (from the Democrats' point of view), one of those reasons is freedom. Once the federal government declares something for everyone universally, any individual or communitiy has lost their ability to choose for themselves. If a state here or there wants to implement socialistic health care, fine, but don't require other states to do that. At least, it'll allow people to move about to find a state they can tolerate (with federalized systems, people have to leave the country to find change, or fight tooth and nail for new national legislation).
Simply, the USA is too big and too diverse for a monolithic national health care system to work.
That would require Democrats and Republicans first understanding that Libertarians can promise both social justice and limited government without the internal conflicts of those parties.
Wouldn't it just be better and simpler to let the Republicans spy on us via the CIA/FBI and the Democrats to spy on us via universal health care, so we can be sure that the government will protect all our interests in a professional and efficient manner through the resulting well-informed policy making? They already manage our economy so well via the IRS that they surely deserve the opportunity and our support in these other agendas, er, I mean endeavors.
I think a modest screen that is large enough to exert relatively low pressure differentials will protect the manatees in the area. However, what I'm really worried about are the sea monkeys. Poor little guys.
Absolutely. If telemarketers were doing door-to-door sales, the primary tool of the citizens for preserving their rights is a gun. Too bad we can't threaten to shoot a person through a phone line.
This would be a truly great referendum. Screw congress; let the People cast real votes telling the telemarketers where they can put their calling lists.
echo "If I call him 5000 times, that is harassment, but if 5000 people each call him once, what is that?" | sed -e "s/call him/shove a fist up his ass/g"
I hope this makes the answer to your question self-evident.
By the way UNIX pipelines are awesome.
Re:Threat to Athlon64: Prescott (not Pentium 4)
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
·
· Score: 1
Opteron's hypertransport can scale to thousands of CPUs.
Correction noted. I'm certainly not arguing that AMD doesn't have a good CPU on its hands.
That should read "300,000,000+ suspected terrorists".
Well, have you heard of terrorism being committed by dead people or people who haven't been born, yet? Obviously, all humans are potential terrorists, and the PATRIOT Act simply allows them the freedom to live their life in a maximum security prison. Thus, by imprisoning everyone, we are free from terrorism. You do support freedom, right?
It is interesting how history is always repeating itself with respect to improving technology. But, we cannot preserve the status quo, because the future holds unimaginable promise for humanity!
For example, I think lawnmower technology will evolve until we end up with a automatic mower with four legs and a chopper-jaw assembly near the front, chemical processing unit near the middle, and a processed-grass dispensor at the rear. Using sophisticated AI algorithms, it will roam the lawn in search of higher grass that needs trimming. All by itself!
I like to think that as long as Microsoft keeps making, er, crappy software, and as long as we still have crackers writing virii and trojans, I don't have to worry about losing my job.
So, you are an auto mechanic...in disguise. I hate to say it, but Microsoft became number one by being the Chevy of computing. It'll get you there--most of the time.
The reality is though, that "1 in 7" users have problems with the power button.
This is probably true, but I hope this doesn't drive people to call for regulation prematurely. There is a single fact about the entire computing industry: we are still in our childhood!
It is clear, even the best efforts we see today leave things to be desired. Things that are obvious (simple data entry will be a problem for a long time coming) and things that are less so (vendor incompetence chipping away at productivity and morale).
Accountability is clearly an issue, and, as far as we can tell, accountability is still intact--its just that no one has had the real driving need to call up the lawyers...yet. The main reason for this is: nearly all "change for the better" whether it is the government or the private sectore is written in either blood or other crushing loss. So, whether the free market dumps Microsoft like a dirty diaper or the government regulates everything into stagnation, we will see software vendors get whipped into shape harshly in due time.
Many US agencies standardize on a single vendor (a fascist one, nearly).
Then, they suffer crippling downtime from that vendor's flawed products.
Side-splitting laughter ensues.
"Where is that laughter coming from," asks an official.
"The rest of the populated world," says his aide.
I have heard people post things like, "in the government, no real system uses Windows. Critical things still use OSXYZ, etc." Okay, then why do whole portions of the US government infrastructure go down due to a casual Windows-borne virus?
Another question, does anyone working IT in the government enjoy their job? I mean saying they really enjoy it without resorting to cynical quips about their bureaucratic superiors to change the subject?
Even if we do the right thing for protecting our chilren (permanently locking them into a padded basement, obviously), we have this critical dilemma:
1) No sunlight can lead to soft bones, nutrient deficiency, and obvious harm. 2) Sunlight can lead to skin cancer, "leather face" (for the teen beach bunnies out there), and obvious harm.
Damn.
Okay, the right way to protect the children, then, is to have no children. Problem solved.
What, even this isn't satisfactory? What do you mean you want kids?
It's an easy path to cross-platformness, and has some good deployment options (i.e. web start).
Does anyone have solid experience with Java 2D, Java 3D, and the Java Sound API? These would probably be the make-it-or-break-it aspects of Java for gamers.
Re:Threat to Athlon64: Prescott (not Pentium 4)
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
·
· Score: 1
P4 Xeon
It's really the only remaining 32-bit server-focused CPU that I know of (I suppose Athlon MP could be one, too). All other server CPUs are now 64-bit.
Re:Threat to Athlon64: Prescott (not Pentium 4)
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
·
· Score: 1
Now that Opteron has Hypertransport -- a highly scalable big bandwidth point to point link protocol, what exactly is the advantage of the other RISC contenders in the high end enterprise space?
I believe Opteron is designed to scale to 4, perhaps 8, CPUs...the others go up to the thousands. Opteron would be just fine, however, for a cluster based on 4-cpu nodes.
A nice instruction set? Sorry, that doesn't cut it anymore.
Shhh...you'll hurt dbx's feelings. I'm not an expert on assembler but occastionally have had to read blocks of SPARC or MIPS code in a debugger. RISC is very comprehensible, which is probably why my computer architecture classes taught it and based CPU-design projects on it (load, store, do stuff to register, easy pipelining, etc.).
I feel strongly that simplicity and transparency at all levels in a system is important for long-term robustness. RISC isn't a bad foundation for this (not only that, SPARC is an openly-published and very cheaply licensable ISA).
x86 will become the dominant instruction set across all computing sectors with the exception of embedded.
Open Source is our hedge against this. Of the four most widely recognized OSS kernels (the BSDs and Linux), all run on more than one non-x86 architecture.
I really have to plead the Fifth, here. It is proprietary information and something the company probably wouldn't want divulged on Slashdot (which is only a mostly-anonymous forum).
Mainly, I was just trying to increase awareness that "web based" isn't a panacea, when there is often incompetent management who doesn't listen to the technical arguments and who chooses a system based on saving face and/or reprehensible laziness.
Well, how about a hint: the system's user login ID is a 13-digit integer. The developers must have thought, "Gee, let's give all the users a 13-digit integer for a login ID, they'll love it." Granted the integer is fairly intuitive to derive, because it is based on other information, but it is just one of the cozy features of the system that makes everyone love it so much.
1) The people behind OpenBSD and OpenSSH are much less driven by time-to-market and ooh-shiney crap than the monkeys at Microsoft are.
2) OpenBSD and OpenSSH actually strive for simplicity rather than obsess over bullet-points.
3) OpenBSD's default install has basically only OpenSSH as a public service (among a handful more). This is already light-years ahead of numerous (thousands undiscovered, probably) default-available remote-root exploits in Windows.
4) The people behind OpenSSH are much less likely (although no one's perfect) to sweep things under the rug than Microsoft.
Microsoft is like a car dealership complete with greasy salespeople. OpenBSD/OpenSSH basically have no salespeople (word of mouth, who'd have thunk that?).
Slashdot Mirror
the government will look at the cost of switching to Macs
Well, now they could consider putting Sun's JDS on the PCs they already have.
I wonder if leaders in the DHS, Army, and Navy are concerned about their billion-dollar POs to Microsoft resellers. I wonder if military strategists who understand what vulnerability to attack really is have provided any input into the purchasing decisions of these organizations.
It almost seems these purchasing decisions must have been purely "orders from the clouds," where the rank-n-file workers disagree but having dealing with it or quitting as their only options.
I think that ideally you'd want to buy your drives over a 6-8 months period from different suppliers for every drive...
I respectfully disagree. For a high-availability array, which would you rather have:
- a set of six matched drives, with the same firmware revision and protocol implementation nuances providing thousands fewer variables when troubleshooting a failing system.
- six randomly purchased drives with who-knows-what and who-knows-how-they-will-interact providing only the possibility of trial-and-error chance resolutions of problems.
I think there's a reason why Sun manages the firmware revision of their harddrives as part of their complete software configuration. Sun even provides patch sets to upgrade drives to fix anomolies that come up.
Yes, there is more than just brand-name behind Sun's high OEM prices (and Sun knows it too...that'll be $600, please).
Your tin foil hat is too tight, I think.
Nope. Do you like the perverse array of special allowances, exclusions, preferences, credits, exemptions, and loopholes in the current tax code, nearly all of which are politically-motivated band-aids or favors for all sorts of people who don't really need or deserve them? If you do, I bet you can't wait for the splendor of federal-government-managed health care. It'll be great.
Also, you can look forward to the federal government having unfettered access to your personal medial history for whatever purpose they deem fit.
There are fundamental problems in arguments for nationalized health care that don't require the tin hat, however. One is scale. While Dean may have done wonders in his state of a few million people, just wait until he has to scale it up by two orders of magnitude while fighting the congresspeople of fifty mostly-independent states.
There are very good reasons why our government is distributed in nature (cities/counties/states/nation). Ironically (from the Democrats' point of view), one of those reasons is freedom. Once the federal government declares something for everyone universally, any individual or communitiy has lost their ability to choose for themselves. If a state here or there wants to implement socialistic health care, fine, but don't require other states to do that. At least, it'll allow people to move about to find a state they can tolerate (with federalized systems, people have to leave the country to find change, or fight tooth and nail for new national legislation).
Simply, the USA is too big and too diverse for a monolithic national health care system to work.
Vote Libertarian.
That would require Democrats and Republicans first understanding that Libertarians can promise both social justice and limited government without the internal conflicts of those parties.
Wouldn't it just be better and simpler to let the Republicans spy on us via the CIA/FBI and the Democrats to spy on us via universal health care, so we can be sure that the government will protect all our interests in a professional and efficient manner through the resulting well-informed policy making? They already manage our economy so well via the IRS that they surely deserve the opportunity and our support in these other agendas, er, I mean endeavors.
manatee
I think a modest screen that is large enough to exert relatively low pressure differentials will protect the manatees in the area. However, what I'm really worried about are the sea monkeys. Poor little guys.
Should that be "...to harness to power of the moon..."?
How many watt-hours does the moon offer us, anyway?
Will it be enough for the next generation of Pentium 4 CPUs?
Corporations are NOT PROTECTED BY THE FIRST AMENDMENT!
Neither are chemical compounds, so shut up or I'll turn on the lights!!! Bwahahahaha!
Is there a right NOT to be an audience?
Absolutely. If telemarketers were doing door-to-door sales, the primary tool of the citizens for preserving their rights is a gun. Too bad we can't threaten to shoot a person through a phone line.
Essentially, this makes telemarketers cowards.
This would be a truly great referendum. Screw congress; let the People cast real votes telling the telemarketers where they can put their calling lists.
echo "If I call him 5000 times, that is harassment, but if 5000 people each call him once, what is that?" | sed -e "s/call him/shove a fist up his ass/g"
I hope this makes the answer to your question self-evident.
By the way UNIX pipelines are awesome.
Opteron's hypertransport can scale to thousands of CPUs.
Correction noted. I'm certainly not arguing that AMD doesn't have a good CPU on its hands.
That should read "300,000,000+ suspected terrorists".
Well, have you heard of terrorism being committed by dead people or people who haven't been born, yet? Obviously, all humans are potential terrorists, and the PATRIOT Act simply allows them the freedom to live their life in a maximum security prison. Thus, by imprisoning everyone, we are free from terrorism. You do support freedom, right?
We can't have that now, can we?
It is interesting how history is always repeating itself with respect to improving technology. But, we cannot preserve the status quo, because the future holds unimaginable promise for humanity!
For example, I think lawnmower technology will evolve until we end up with a automatic mower with four legs and a chopper-jaw assembly near the front, chemical processing unit near the middle, and a processed-grass dispensor at the rear. Using sophisticated AI algorithms, it will roam the lawn in search of higher grass that needs trimming. All by itself!
I like to think that as long as Microsoft keeps making, er, crappy software, and as long as we still have crackers writing virii and trojans, I don't have to worry about losing my job.
So, you are an auto mechanic...in disguise. I hate to say it, but Microsoft became number one by being the Chevy of computing. It'll get you there--most of the time.
I once worked for an engineer who was very fond of quoting that, by definition, 50% of the population has an IQ below 100.
What an amazing prediction of the 2000 Presidential election!
The reality is though, that "1 in 7" users have problems with the power button.
This is probably true, but I hope this doesn't drive people to call for regulation prematurely. There is a single fact about the entire computing industry: we are still in our childhood!
It is clear, even the best efforts we see today leave things to be desired. Things that are obvious (simple data entry will be a problem for a long time coming) and things that are less so (vendor incompetence chipping away at productivity and morale).
Accountability is clearly an issue, and, as far as we can tell, accountability is still intact--its just that no one has had the real driving need to call up the lawyers...yet. The main reason for this is: nearly all "change for the better" whether it is the government or the private sectore is written in either blood or other crushing loss. So, whether the free market dumps Microsoft like a dirty diaper or the government regulates everything into stagnation, we will see software vendors get whipped into shape harshly in due time.
Many US agencies standardize on a single vendor (a fascist one, nearly).
Then, they suffer crippling downtime from that vendor's flawed products.
Side-splitting laughter ensues.
"Where is that laughter coming from," asks an official.
"The rest of the populated world," says his aide.
I have heard people post things like, "in the government, no real system uses Windows. Critical things still use OSXYZ, etc." Okay, then why do whole portions of the US government infrastructure go down due to a casual Windows-borne virus?
Another question, does anyone working IT in the government enjoy their job? I mean saying they really enjoy it without resorting to cynical quips about their bureaucratic superiors to change the subject?
"protecting children"
Even if we do the right thing for protecting our chilren (permanently locking them into a padded basement, obviously), we have this critical dilemma:
1) No sunlight can lead to soft bones, nutrient deficiency, and obvious harm.
2) Sunlight can lead to skin cancer, "leather face" (for the teen beach bunnies out there), and obvious harm.
Damn.
Okay, the right way to protect the children, then, is to have no children. Problem solved.
What, even this isn't satisfactory? What do you mean you want kids?
Ah, crap.
It's an easy path to cross-platformness, and has some good deployment options (i.e. web start).
Does anyone have solid experience with Java 2D, Java 3D, and the Java Sound API? These would probably be the make-it-or-break-it aspects of Java for gamers.
P4 Xeon
It's really the only remaining 32-bit server-focused CPU that I know of (I suppose Athlon MP could be one, too). All other server CPUs are now 64-bit.
Now that Opteron has Hypertransport -- a highly scalable big bandwidth point to point link protocol, what exactly is the advantage of the other RISC contenders in the high end enterprise space?
I believe Opteron is designed to scale to 4, perhaps 8, CPUs...the others go up to the thousands. Opteron would be just fine, however, for a cluster based on 4-cpu nodes.
A nice instruction set? Sorry, that doesn't cut it anymore.
Shhh...you'll hurt dbx's feelings. I'm not an expert on assembler but occastionally have had to read blocks of SPARC or MIPS code in a debugger. RISC is very comprehensible, which is probably why my computer architecture classes taught it and based CPU-design projects on it (load, store, do stuff to register, easy pipelining, etc.).
I feel strongly that simplicity and transparency at all levels in a system is important for long-term robustness. RISC isn't a bad foundation for this (not only that, SPARC is an openly-published and very cheaply licensable ISA).
x86 will become the dominant instruction set across all computing sectors with the exception of embedded.
Open Source is our hedge against this. Of the four most widely recognized OSS kernels (the BSDs and Linux), all run on more than one non-x86 architecture.
I'm glad Google let you research your hobbies, so you are sure you aren't missing out on anything. Bon Appetit!
I really have to plead the Fifth, here. It is proprietary information and something the company probably wouldn't want divulged on Slashdot (which is only a mostly-anonymous forum).
Mainly, I was just trying to increase awareness that "web based" isn't a panacea, when there is often incompetent management who doesn't listen to the technical arguments and who chooses a system based on saving face and/or reprehensible laziness.
Well, how about a hint: the system's user login ID is a 13-digit integer. The developers must have thought, "Gee, let's give all the users a 13-digit integer for a login ID, they'll love it." Granted the integer is fairly intuitive to derive, because it is based on other information, but it is just one of the cozy features of the system that makes everyone love it so much.
I don't see a difference.
1) The people behind OpenBSD and OpenSSH are much less driven by time-to-market and ooh-shiney crap than the monkeys at Microsoft are.
2) OpenBSD and OpenSSH actually strive for simplicity rather than obsess over bullet-points.
3) OpenBSD's default install has basically only OpenSSH as a public service (among a handful more). This is already light-years ahead of numerous (thousands undiscovered, probably) default-available remote-root exploits in Windows.
4) The people behind OpenSSH are much less likely (although no one's perfect) to sweep things under the rug than Microsoft.
Microsoft is like a car dealership complete with greasy salespeople. OpenBSD/OpenSSH basically have no salespeople (word of mouth, who'd have thunk that?).
Which makes you feel more warm and cozy?